Hat Trick! with Jonathan McDonald

Hat Trick! with Jonathan McDonald

Jordan Eberle of Team Canada, left and teammate Taylor Hall celebrate Eberle's first-period goal during the 2010 IHF World Junior Hockey Championships in Saskatoon at Credit Union Centre. Sunday, January 03, 2010.Photo by
GREG PENDER

Every Monday and Wednesday, Province Sports editor Jonathan McDonald delivers the Hat Trick – three things he’s pondering in the wide (or not so wide) world of sports …

1. I’ve had a weekend to digest the NHL and Canucks schedules for the 2013-14 season, and I’m having a hard time finding something to criticize. Sure, I’m not overly thrilled about the over-preponderance of gimmick games – among them, two games at Yankee Stadium, one game at B.C. Place, which commissioner Gary Bettman calls “one of the world’s great facilities” – but it’s hard not to be excited about a season that features both the Olympics and every team playing every other team at least twice.

Frankly, the endless cycle of dull Northwest Division teams dragging their sorry asses into Rogers Arena – and the Canucks going the other way – was beyond tiresome. It reeked of a lack of creative scheduling, an opportunity for the NHL to do something special. The league loved to talk about rivalries, but how many truly great rivalries are there? It’s been eons since the two Alberta teams have been true rivals of the Canucks. Now it’s the Blackhawks. The Bruins. The Leafs. The Kings. And now we don’t have to wonder if we’ll be seeing them here – or the Canucks there.

I’ve long been a proponent of avoiding spending your money early in the season – that if ever games will be dull, it’s in the first half, when the pressure to accumulate points just isn’t there, where the Wild have already visited three times and it’s only mid-November.

In this coming season, the Canucks will play the Canadiens, the Flyers, Cody Hodgson’s Sabres, the Penguins, the improving Islanders, the Capitals and the Leafs – all by mid-November. Suddenly, I’m seeing many more reasons to stay home to watch a game. Increasingly, I just wasn’t bothering, instead checking out the highlights later on the NHL’s excellent iPad app.

I loved last season’s 48-game schedule, and had often suggested that there should be a lockout every fall. I dreaded returning to 82 games. Well, I haven’t felt that dread since the schedule was released. That’s good news.

2. Patrick Johnston, your friendly neighbourhood mobile/tablet guru for The Province, has been busy this morning etching Team Canada’s lineup for the Sochi Olympics. I looked at his list. Very interesting. He’d scratched off a couple of names: Joe Thornton, Andrew Ladd. “And Patrice Bergeron,” says Johnston. “I scratched him off in my head.”

But it got us thinking about this late-August training camp in Calgary. It’s one thing to be 23-year-old Jordan Eberle, who isn’t expected to make the 2014 team but should be in the prime of his career in 2018. If you’re Eberle, you are SO at that camp. Yes sir, no sir, what else can I do for you, sir? But what if you’re Chris Kunitz, and you’re 10-and-a-half years older than Eberle? Are you honoured? Are you insulted? What are you? And more importantly, will you leave the cozy confines of, say, Muskoka, or Lake of the Woods, or Manitou Beach (you get the picture), to go to Calgary for a few days – knowing that the brass really isn’t remotely interested in you?

Sure, sure, there’s the optics thing. If you reject their offer, you can pretty much kiss any world championship invitation goodbye. Again, if you’re Chris Kunitz, does that matter? I mean, you play for the Pittsburgh Penguins, they are – I gather – a fairly good team, and you’re locked in for another four years. Uh, there’s no world championship for you. That is not on your horizon. Tough call, Chris Kunitz, tough call. I vote for the cottage.

(Note: Kunitz fans, I do not mean to single out your man. I could have singled out a Florida Panther. Except they didn’t get a single invitation.)

3. By the end of the Tour de France, I’d pretty much booked my tickets to Paris. Congratulations, France. You have reeled another one in. Because that is the true appeal of the Tour de France. The cycling is wonderful and everything, but the mountains! The villages! The cobblestone streets and thousand-year-old buildings! Les chateaux! The vineyards! The little old ladies and men wearing horse heads!

And by the time the riders were going round and round on the Champs-Elysees on Sunday, the deal was done. Between the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre, I was sold. I sat there, half-watching the race, half-surfing VRBO, looking for the perfect apartment rental in the third arondissement.

A year from now, I guarantee you I won’t be able to remember who won the 2013 Tour de France. Instead, a year from now, I might just be in France instead. Merci et bonne nuit.

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